The dawn of Art Deco in Bombay

The Art Deco style first appeared in India when Indian royal families, entrepreneurs and merchants of the widely travelled educated upper middle class, eager to adopt contemporary trends in western culture, began to assume its sophistication in dress, furnishings and architectural design.

The elite group frequented London and Paris on English and French ocean liners. On these European visits they grew conversant with modern design, attending such events as the 1925 Paris Exposition, the British Empire Exhibition in London of 1924 and Scotland's Empire Exhibition of 1938, in Glasgow.

Additionally, they stayed at such moderne hotels in London as Clar-idge's, The Park Lane Hotel and The Strand Palace.

In the 1930s Bombay saw its educated middle class (schooled in British institutions) grow as a result of the city's expanding port commerce. Because of a pressing requirement to house the growing middle class, a land reclamation project, the Backbay Land Reclamation Scheme, was initiated.

Its implementation from 1928 to 1942 spurred a frenzy of building activity. The new city required a new architecture, and the moderne style (sometimes called Art Moderne or Streamlined Moderne) precisely expressed the requisite optimism.

The city's first Art Deco district, Churchgate (a well-defined residential neighbourhood) was built on land reclaimed from bay waters, in the mid to late 1930s on the western side of the Oval Maidan adjacent to the grand Neo Gothic civic structures in the heart of the old city.

Following the mid 1930s and through the 40s it extended further west to Marine Drive and further north to Malabar Hill, Cumballa Hill and several suburbs of Bombay (namely the districts of Matunga, Mahim, Da-dar and Juhu).

As a consequence of this planned development phase, the neighbourhoods of Churchgate and Marine Drive have the densest concentrations of Art Deco architecture in the city.

Hundreds of small-scale residential buildings emerged here on land parcels reclaimed from the sea. Strict regulations governed their construction ensuring uniformity of height and use of materials.

A well-monitored development scheme concentrated a vast assembly of those buildings in the two neighbourhoods where the application of the progressive-looking Art Deco style prevailed.

The architectural design borrowed imagery from the new age, incorporating nautical details of steamship lines, influences from Egyptian and Classical art, Cubism, industrialism, and Hollywood films.

The view east from the centre of the Oval Maidan is of the enormous and ornate Gothic civic structures, commissioned during the height of the Victorian era, such as the Bombay High Court, The Secretariat and the Rajabhai Tower in the University of Bombay which was designed by English architect George Gilbert Scott.

The view west shows the human-scale Art Deco buildings with futuristic, machine age and tropical imagery. These include Court View, Empress Court, Rajjab Mahal, Green Fields and Shiv Shanti Bhuvan. Remarkably, most of these residential Art Deco buildings were commissioned and designed by Indian rather than British developers and architects.

The Oval Maidan ultimately became a unique architectural setting in which the styles of two different centuries faced each other across a green expanse. It is the only location in the world where vast assemblages of Victo-rian Gothic and Art Deco architecture can be found in the same neighbourhood.